In the actual world, decisions do not occur in this kind of vacuum, and it’s just as important to pay attention to the factors that structure individual choices as the nature of those choices. For example, we can ask whether it’s morally justified for me to steal a block of cheese in order to feed my starving, cheese-addicted child. (It is.) But if we focus on hashing out that question, debating how individuals should balance their obligation to follow the law with their obligation to their loved ones, we miss the far more crucial one: why am I even in this situation? The whole reason I am faced with an unpleasant set of choices is that I live in a highly unequal society in which children are deprived of the basic cheeses they need in order to survive. If we zero in on the question of what I should do once my choices have been set for me, we fail to ask whose actions caused me to have those particular options available to me, a.k.a. How Did I End Up On This Fucking Trolley To Begin With? If am forced against my will into a situation where people will die and I have no ability to stop it, how is my choice a “moral” choice between meaningfully different options, as opposed to a horror show I’ve just been thrust into, in which I have no meaningful agency at all? Let’s think a bit more about who put me here and how to keep them from having diabolical power over others. (Some might say this makes the trolley problem the perfect philosophy question for the “neoliberal” era, since it reduces everything to individual choice and tells us there is no alternative to existing power structures. Since the word “neoliberalism” is banned from the pages of Current Affairs, though, we ourselves would not say this.)

This is, as I've argued, indeed the defining feature of bourgeois practical philosophy.

[M]ost changes happen gradually and under the radar. A few mechanisms of these changes are well understood, such as the ‘mere exposure effect’: the more you are exposed to something, the more you tend to like it. Another, more troubling one, is that the more your desire for something is frustrated, the more you tend to dislike it. These changes happen gradually, often without us noticing anything.

The problem is this: if we change while our self-image remains the same, then there will be a deep abyss between who we are and who we think we are. And this leads to conflict.

To make things worse, we are exceptionally good at dismissing even the possibility that we might change. Psychologists have given this phenomenon a fancy name: ‘The End of History Illusion’. We all think that who we are now is the finished product: we will be the same in five, 10, 20 years. But, as these psychologists found, this is completely delusional – our preferences and values will be very different already in the not-so-distant future.

Why is this such a big issue? It might be okay when it comes to ordering the espresso. Maybe you now slightly prefer cappuccino, but you think of yourself as an espresso kind of person, so you keep ordering espresso. So you’re enjoying your morning drink a little bit less – not such a big deal.

But what is true of espresso is true of other preferences and values in life. Maybe you used to genuinely enjoy doing philosophy, but you no longer do. But as being a philosopher is such a stable feature of your self-image, you keep doing it. There is a huge difference between what you like and what you do. What you do is dictated not by what you like, but by what kind of person you think you are.

A number of rather serious philosophers (more serious, certainly, than the latest p-hackers in the increasingly beleaguered field of psychology) have advanced the view that character--who one is--is quite stable over much of one's life. Schopenhauer may be the most famous modern proponent of the idea, but Nietzsche, notwithstanding the narcissism of small differences of which he was often guilty, agreed. This passage is typical:

At the foundation of each of us, the "real bottom," there is clearly something unteachable, a brick wall of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decisions and answers to selected questions. With respect to cardinal problems, an immutable "that I am" speaks up. (Beyond Good and Evil, 231)

The defect in the literature Prof. Nanay alludes to is that it can't distinguish between the changes that are just "noise" and those that are foundational to who the person really is. In addition to the p-value disaster currently afflicting psychology, there really is a serious (dare I say it?) "philosophical" problem, namely, that these folks are not at all clear about what it is to be the person that one is. They need to read some Schopenhauer and Nietzsche!

I confess I've never seen anything like it in 25+ years of watching these things. There are jobs expressing serious interest in post-Kantian Continental philosophy at Berkeley, Notre Dame, Rice, Boston College, Harvard, Durham, William & Mary, Haverford, among other places! The old "core analytic" is dying, but the much-neglected post-Kantian Continental seems to be enjoying a new "market demand."

Perhaps Anglophone departments have figured out that (1) post-Kantian Continental philosophy is a magnet for enrollments, given how interesting and influential across disciplines figures like Marx and Nietzsche and Foucault are, and (2) the quality of the candidates teaching in this area is now as high as in any other specialty?

One big advantage of having turned over the PGR burden to others is that I can now speak much more freely about what I think about trends in academic philosophy. My prediction is that the most successful departments going forward will be those that offer serious coverage of post-Kantian philosophers on the European Continent.

Bias and neglect of non-Western philosophy in Anglphone departments is very real, but hardly surprising, given the remoteness of language and culture; much more surprising has always been the neglect of European philosophy of the last two centuries: translations of these figures are widely available; the ideas of the great 19th-century thinkers in particular permeate the entire curriculum in Western universities; and, perhaps most importantly, there are now a large number of serious young scholars--in terms of basic scholarly discipline and philosophical competence--working on these issues. For a long time, there was clearly an issue about finding young philosophers interested in the post-Kantian traditions who were not muddleheads. That time is now past. The best young scholars working on the post-Kantian Continental traditions are as good as the best scholars of early modern or ancient philosophy, not to mention the latest expert on the metaphysics of grounding!

The idea that any good department, whether at the PhD level or the undergraduate level, would not have a specialist in the rich European traditions post-Kant will soon, I am hopeful, become a relic of the past.

ADDENDUM: When I talk about post-Kantian Continental philosophy, I mean the German Idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault--I do not mean charlatans like Zizek or the latest silliness out of Paris. It's the former figures who now regularly attract excellent and philosophically informed scholarship, and it is these figures that the recent job ads are targetting.

PhilJobs is starting to fill up with ads, though not as many ads as one would like to see (at least not yet). But what is striking is the pattern in areas of interest: lots of value theory and history of philosophy (esp. early modern, but also a fair bit of 19th-century), some currently "trendy" areas like philosophy of race and gender, but very little "core analytic" (as the Stanford ad puts it), i.e., very little philosophy of language and mind, metaphyscis & epistemology, the latter being the historical "prestige" trackers in the profession for the last half-century. But as I've remarked before, what is prestigious and central at the top PhD programs may no longer bear much relationship to most of the jobs that exist. That seems increasingly true (we've seen other signs of it).

Far too many PhD programs currently operate on what we might call "the MIT model": little or no history of philosophy or post-Kantian Continental philosophy, certainly no non-Western philosophy, but lots and lots of "core analytic" (sometimes with some philosophy of science thrown in), plus a bit of value theory, though mostly to the extent it is close to the former areas. The MIT model served MIT well when Robert Stalnaker was active and training tons of students, and before Stephen Yablo was, tragically, taken ill (though Yablo is still teaching happily). Perhaps the MIT model can survive as a viable model for graduation education, and might do so if MIT were the only purveyor--but the University of Southern California, despite being a much larger faculty, has adopted the MIT Model with a vengeance, and Rutgers has largely migrated in that direction. Other "MIT model" programs--wholly or heading in that direction--include Michigan, Texas, U Mass/Amherst, Rochester, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, among others.

A close, but preferable (at least by my lights) relative, is the "Princeton Model," where the investment is heaviest in "core analytic," but there is also a substantial commitment to history of philosophy and sometimes even post-Kantian Continental. NYU followed the Princeton Model, more successfully than Princeton, which no doubt explains its dominant position in Anglophone philosophy. "Princeton Model" departments include Pittsburgh, Yale, Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Brown, and Cornell, among many others.

...at CHE. It includes, alas, the usual ignorant bashing of "technical" philosophy, which is ironic given that Hilary Putnam's most important contributions were all in the technical mode, and not in his more "popular" writing.

Preston Stovall is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic, an adjunct instructor at the University of Nevada and La Roche College, and an education researcher with Studium Consulting. He kindly shared with me this interesting piece about his teaching experiences, which I suspect will interest others (especially as it relates to this earlier discussion):

In the spring of this year David Hoinski, Justin Humphreys, and I ran a course on philosophy for 4th graders at Woolslair Elementary, a public STEAM magnet school in Pittsburgh (STEAM is STEM with a component on the arts). Two months later I taught a similar course for the elementary students in the summer camp at the Ellis School, a private girls’ school also in Pittsburgh. Building off of work done on philosophy for children (P4C) over the last 40 years, (and with some input from Christi Favor) we designed a course around the notion of a community of inquiry (cf. Teaching Philosophy in Europe and North America, p.20). That community is centered around the cultivation of more precise modes of thought, directed at answering basic questions about knowledge, value, society, and the good life. These modes of thought were embodied in a ‘philosophical toolkit’ containing a number of simple concepts and distinctions with wide application, including analogical reasoning, the distinction between appearance and reality, and the distinction between causal explanation and rational justification. After their introduction, the students were encouraged to use these tools throughout the rest of the course as ‘free moves’ in the conversations we were to have. Both courses were well-received, and Woolslair asked us to teach two classes for the full year beginning in September. Our hope is that this project, should it find funding, will be able to help support one or two recent PhDs in philosophy. In addition to its value as a component in primary and secondary education, we believe the profession of philosophy has much to gain from programs of this sort.

In reality, however, there is no justification for such claims. Getting higher test scores after studying philosophy does not show that higher scores are the result of studying philosophy. For all we know, it may be that philosophy students are brighter than average to begin with, and that this is why they perform so well on the tests. If that were true, their high scores would have nothing to do with their studying philosophy courses. Therefore, as long as this alternative hypothesis is not ruled out, no inference about practical benefits of philosophy is logically permissible.

I was raised by a mother who was a devout Muslim and a father who was a devout Marxist. He won the battle for my childhood soul and I remember reading (though, of course, not understanding) a two volume edition of the selected works of Marx and Engels when I was about 11. I read a lot of Marxist literature in my teens and I still remember the look of shock on the face of one of my schoolteachers when he discovered that the book I was trying to conceal from him was Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky. At that time I would probably have thought that it would be quite cool to grow up to be a philosopher, but even cooler to be a political economist. I don’t think my teenage Marxist self would have been impressed by the kind of philosophy I’ve done for most of my career but might have found my current work mildly interesting.

Philosopher Eliot Michaelson (King's College, London, who took his PhD at UCLA) explains this new project with the actor James Franco:

About mid-way through my time in grad school, my friend James Franco suggested that we do a project together. James is an actor, and a reasonably well-known one I’ve come to learn. I had taught him in my second year of grad school—he was taking a break from acting to finish the undergrad degree in English he had put on hold years earlier when he was cast in the short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks—and we had somehow ended up becoming friends. In part, probably because I had no idea who he was. The project we finally settled on, Philosophy Time, is a series of short videos in which we interview philosophers about topics that we hope will prove of interest to a wide audience. For our ‘pilot’ season, we interviewed Liz Camp on metaphor and imagination, Liz Harman on the ethics of abortion, Andy Egan on taste and beauty, and Shamik Dasgupta on the fundamental nature of the universe. Sadly, we never figured out how to cut anything from that last interview down to a five-minute segment—but we did manage to pull four segments out of the rest. Those are now overlaid with some helpful animations and will, I sincerely hope, serve to attract the interest of a few of those outside our field to the range of interesting work going on within it. Like most other attempts at public philosophy, these videos are hardly perfect (I should know, having spent hours trying to figure out how to edit out the flaws!). Nonetheless, I hope that people in the field will find them useful, or at least mildly amusing. Thanks to Brian for linking to these here, and I hope that I’ll be able to return in the future with a few more of them.

UPDATE: A graduate student writes, protesting the comment (at the link) that, scholars of Chinese philosophy "just remain silent" on the sexism of the Confucian tradition. The student writes:

How does she explain all of the books and anthologies on the issue? Here is an incomplete list:

The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender (Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy), Bloomsbury Academic (April 21, 2016)

Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (S U N Y Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture), State University of New York Press (July 30, 1998)

Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation (Suny Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture), State University of New York Press (June 1, 2007)

Women in Daoism, Three Pines Press (June 30, 2005)

Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (June 20, 2003)

There are also a number of articles on the issue.

The best schools for Chinese philosophy are unranked in the overall rankings. The cards are already stacked against me. Please do not allow misinformed moral indignation from an established member of the profession make life even harder for the worst off.

I study what I study because I love the material, not because I am on a diversity high horse.

ANOTHER: Reader Michael Bramley writes: "I couldn't help but notice the author assumed both the gender and the race of the entity known as 'Confucious' and as a result I was hideously offended. Please include trigger warnings next time lest the steam from my outraged ears melt my snowflake crown of entitlement."

No particularly "sexy" ones from the standpoint of philosophers, I would imagine, but good news for the beleaguered field of psychology. (If I'm wrong about the philosophical import of some of these results, please explain in the comments.)